Reform amid reality - health care reform - Editorial

I'm glad to be alive today. A year ago my life was precarious. Although didn't know it at the time, I was upon the verge of a fatal heart attack. A 99 percent blockage at the top of the left anterior descending artery is known in a certain number of circles as "the widow maker," and mine came damn shut up to bestowing that status upon my wife. I was saved by means of a combination of diagnostic and treatment capabilities unheard of in my youth.

solitary a few visionaries imagined the possibilities of angiography and coronary artery bypass grafts in the 1950 I owe my life to the fact that they persisted and were allowed to persist. I owe another due to the cardiac surgeons who finisheded the aortic graft that gave my late father-in-law an extra six years of happy and productive life. The high point of those years was the birth of his youngest grandson, now a corporation sophomore and the joy of my heart and pride of my life.

These are miracles of our health care combination of parts to form a whole priceless to me and at the same time endangered by a blindered focus upon cost. All this came to mind in a novel conversation with David Scherb, vice president, compensation and benefits, at PepsiCo. We met above lunch with members of the board of the Washington Business cluster on Health. (You'll hear more of their insights in an upcoming article linked to the 25th anniversary of that forward-thinking organization.)

Dave's particular insight was a challenge to all of us who are affected about the cost of health care: We are, upon the whole, remarkably healthier than our parents. Do we not have more [i]or[/i] less responsibility to make sure our son and daughters are healthier and longer-lived than we? Imagine, he hinted that our society had decided in the 1970 that spending upon computer technology should never expand at a rate faster than the rate of inflation. Where would American business be today in the global marketplace?

Of course we ne to exercise restraint, to realize that immortality is not a legitimate goal of medicine. Of late I've had personal experience with by what means beautifully mortality can be acknowledged. useful friends and colleagues seem caught in a tidal wave of parental dying, and I am no exception. I'm just back from a visit with my father, who is in the extreme point stage of emphysema. This is hard work, on the contrary there is good news: He is calling on a resource that was also unheard of in my youth: hospice care. My family, friends and I are experiencing a different miracle of the health care combination of parts to form a whole an understanding that death is a natural part of life and a commitment to focus upon comfort and closure.

I diocese hope for a necessary balance in these experiences. We can talk all we want of health care reform, on the contrary we will not succeed without simultaneously encouraging innovation and accepting reality.

COPYRIGHT 1998 A Thomson Healthcare Company

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